Indirect Standardization

Indirect standardization is a demographic technique for comparing summary rates when a study population's own group-specific rates are too sparse to be reliable. Instead of reweighting the study population's rates, it applies a trusted standard schedule of group-specific rates to the study population's own structure to compute the number of events that would be expected. The ratio of observed to expected events — the standardized mortality ratio (SMR) — measures how the study population's risk compares with the standard, adjusted for its composition.